Stalin vs. Martians (PC) review

"But anyway, the game is an RTS in the same way that margarine is butter, which is to say it's not, but it looks similar! The overhead camera is old hat to the genre. The piles of units marching together toward their objective is familiar. The hud, with its point-and-click interface and minimap, leaves no doubt. Any given screenshot tells the RTS story, but it's only when you play the game that you realize that something has gone horribly wrong. "

On some level, it feels as if all I need to do here is point out that the title of the game is Stalin vs. Martians, and then conclude my review there. When you first hear the title, it's got your attention with its promise of incoming wackiness. But that's the thing, the premise is so unabashedly wacky that it's about as likely to be awful as it is to be awesome. And, well, it's awful. Sometimes wacky just isn't good, no matter how much you want it to be.

Stalin vs. Martians is basically a cascade of badly implemented concepts that should have been easy because they're all so standard. It tries literally nothing new, which is why its failure is so spectacular. It's not just genre traits that it got wrong, but fundamental things that make a PC game a PC game. For example, there are no graphics options. You will be playing the game in what appears to be glorious 800x600, or you won't play the game at all. It honestly blows my mind that this can even happen, and god help you if your monitor is bigger than 20". The whole game turns into something of a pixellated mess, and given the way every environment already looks the same, it makes it kind of difficult to keep track of where things are.

But anyway, the game is an RTS in the same way that margarine is butter, which is to say it's not, but it looks similar! The overhead camera is old hat to the genre. The piles of units marching together toward their objective is familiar. The hud, with its point-and-click interface and minimap, leaves no doubt. Any given screenshot tells the RTS story, but it's only when you play the game that you realize that something has gone horribly wrong.

A key component to effective strategy is loyal troops who will follow your orders without question. Unfortunately, your army hates you with passion undying. Stalin vs. Martians is a game of strategic suggestions that your troops execute with wildly varying amounts of seriousness. If you tell them to go somewhere, they'll slowly turn in that direction and meander to a halt in the general vicinity of where you clicked. If you tell them to attack a target, they'll get around to it, usually. We're getting ahead of ourselves, though, as in order for targeting to be a problem you have to be able to click on your target in the first place.

The basic martian unit resembles a gumball. It's tiny, indistinguishable form comes in a rainbow of colors, and they wander the landscape in swarms at speeds that are just irresponsible. The combination of their speed and the fact that they're about the size of a skittle make them next to impossible to click on, so your only real hope of killing them is running them over with your tanks. You'll never shoot them unless your soldiers just decide to do so while standing around, which you can't exactly rely on.

Because of this, there's no reason to use your basic infantry units, because any enemy in the game that's big enough to click on will shrug off machine gun fire like an elephant in a spring shower. They only excel at killing enemy infantry, but you can't click on them so that's pointless, and a huge wall of tanks will steamroll over every tiny bugger just fine on their way to do actual damage to the huge three eyed green monsters that make up half the game's discernible antagonists.

So there's no strategy to actual combat, which leaves us with clever objectives as the only possible way for the game to earn the S in RTS. As you may have guessed, however, it doesn't have them. Every level is prefaced by 'Uncle Joe' Stalin giving you a briefing about how the alien threat is going to devolve your glorious red nation into a den of lawless anarchy where the civilians devour each other for sustenance just like every imperialist country. Then after that you do whatever arbitrary thing the game tells you to in a series of events that put the mind to Wario Ware.

"Liberate the village!" it might say, giving you an arrow on your minimap to point out the two houses that make up the village that needs rescuing. So you'll go and run over the obnoxious martian horde only to be told seconds later to "Cross the bridge!" and get another arrow. This continues until the game's out of objectives and you complete the mission. What it may as well be saying is "And now jump through these hoops!" Most of the time, an RTS mission will have some kind of very specific goal, one that lends itself to strategic thinking or clever plans of attack.

And that's what it boils down to. This isn't a game about making things happen, it's a game about hoping things happen. You hope your tanks will listen to you and go run over those guys shooting at you. You hope that after you "Form a line of defense!" that the next objective will actually make sense. You hope that at some point the game will get better. Never once will you need wits to get through a tough level. All you need is a high threshold for pain.

The gimmick is simple. Go to the right and win. You can jump, you can shoot, and you can invert gravity within a certain radius of the character. And that's it. There's no plot or villain, just you, a plasma rifle, and a hellish maze of circular saws, moving platforms, and angry robots.

Think back to a normal day in high school. Specifically, remember the routine. Every day, you wake up, you go to class, eat lunch, take tests, talk to friends, and do the same thing you've done a thousand times in real life. Yet through some trickery, it's actually a great game that excels in taking the mundane and mak...

Nifflas makes a very specific kind of game. You can generally pick them out at a glance, it's the kind of game you can sum up in a single sentence.

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Lewis posted June 04, 2009:

It's very funny, though, isn't it?

I mean, obviously rubbish, but as a joke game - what it obviously sets out to be - it's rather successful.

Problem being, you don't often get people happy to pay a tenner for a joke. It grows tiresome after 15 minutes. Definitely not worth it, in a million years.

So, basically: I quite like SvM. But 2 is absolutely the right score. Just surprised you don't mention its sense of humour more.

honestgamer posted June 04, 2009:

I would say that Josh definitely took the right angle with this review. Just because a game is a 'joke' game doesn't mean it has to be bad. In fact, a joke concept can easily be the first step in something fantastic--worth every penny of $40 or $50--if it follows that up with even solid gameplay. That the developers missed things on such a fundamental level is definitely disappointing.

Lewis posted June 04, 2009:

Totally. Which is why I agree it's not in any way a worthwhile purchase. It seems to me, though, that the developers have worked it being a crap game into the fundamental point of the release. Even the press releases joke about it, saying Stalin has censored outside opinion and that's why they're not quoting from any reviews. It seems self-conscious and intentional in its awfulness. To what extent should that be considered when critiquing a game?

Can "being crap" be a part of the joke? Does that make it any less worthless?

In a review, as consumer advice, probably not. But it's worth thinkin' about.

EmP posted June 04, 2009:

There's no denying that they certainly played on the fact that their wacky game was getting slaughtered by critics, and did so brilliantly. Here's the best examples!

But do I think they made a really bad game on purpose? No. I think they saw it getting raped and tried to turn it into a plus as best they could. I applaud their efforts, and, if the game had strayed into the "So bad, it's great" zone, I expect I'd be one of the first with the advertising hook in my mouth. But it sounds more like a "So bad it's bad" title, so nothing happening!

zippdementia posted June 04, 2009:

I thought this was a great review. I'm definitely of the mind that a joke game need not be bad. Look at Zombies Ate My Neighbors! or Earthbound. A bad game isn't a joke. It's very serious.

EmP, I'm curious now. Were you saying there's been some kind of response from the game developers to all the criticism?

EmP posted June 04, 2009:

Those quotes I posted up were from the game's PR basically saying that Stalin screened the reviews for the game for the good of the people.

dragoon_of_infinity posted June 05, 2009:

My first idea for this review was actually to sort of counterplay the humor in the game against the horrible gameplay, and say that the game is worth playing because it's amusing.

Then I kept going, and the humor really sort of burned out and all I was left with was bad game. Yeah, the humor is there, but honestly I don't think it's potent enough to override the other flaws to any noticable degree, so I didn't make a big deal about it because doing so would imply that it did.